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This year, I was invited to view some of Singapore’s National Day Parade events from the rooftop of The Esplanade (a performing arts centre) which is situated near the edge of Marina Bay where the festivities take place. Singapore always celebrates it’s birthday in style with a series of performances which are capped off with the highly anticipated, crowd favorite fireworks show. The ticketed portion of events were held at the floating platform to the left of us (our vantage point was not good enough to see the happenings on stage unfortunately) but the water events were right in front of us, as were most of the fireworks. None of us were able to acquire tickets for the live performance apparently because they are randomly distributed to the locals who apply for inclusion in the drawing for the tickets. That’s what I was told. Anyways, it must have been awesome judging from all the singing, cheering and laughing!

Some of the stuff I got to see were the Navy parachute divers, Parachuting in wet suits and flippers. Then there were wing suit equipped paratroopers jumping from a club record altitude that was so high I couldn’t see them, even though they were bright red.

There were squadrons of helicopters, fighter jets, bombers and surveillance planes doing fly bys and a few stunts as well as a squadron of floating cannons performing gun salutes. It was quite inspiring to see the personnel so methodical in their procedures to fire off the cannons but also frustrating, for me, because I wanted to see them go through the whole routine faster as if they were doing it for real. Anyways, I’m glad they performed at ceremonial speeds because it was harder than I thought to capture the fire coming out of the cannon muzzle. After several tries, I finally caught one. I also was able to catch the commemorative F-15 with afterburner rings (a first for me).

As the day wore on, I got to see what ‘powderworks’ were, I found them so interesting I wrote a post about them here on Steemit. So the time has come for the fireworks and I thought I was prepared. I was told where the fireworks were being launched, the general location of where they would burst etc. I couldn’t have been more wrong! My full battery turned out to be not full at all, my remote trigger decided that it didn’t want to work consistently and I found my 17-40 lens not quite getting it all, after a while I stopped trying and just watched. While packing up, a bunch of us were talking and I’m not the only one who had remote trigger issues, the three of us were using wireless remotes (not IR) so maybe that was the issue, we all had a good laugh and called it a night. All in all good fun and good people.

Consider following me for updates and to find not only my other travel bloopers, blunders and shenanigans but also photography related news/reviews and the occasional contest entry.

All the photos (unless otherwise noted in the post) were taken by me and are available for sale. If you’re interested in buying an image or three, 😃 please don’t hesitate to contact me for more details. Thanks in advance!

Comments & Critiques are always welcome, as are upvotes and resteems.

Thanks for viewing and best wishes!

PS. If you want to check out my other ‘works’, you can find them here:

I had never even heard of powderwords before, much less seen them. So admist all the hooha of Singapore’s 53 birthday celebration, I waited patiently for what was slated in the itinerary as ‘powderworks.’ With the intention of shooting the fireworks, I had set up in between the area where the live performances were to be performed and the area where the fireworks were to be set off (as well as where the Navy divers and floating cannons were going to be performed). When the allotted time came, a mini boom sounded, way over where the stage was and I saw my first ‘powderwoks’! and yes I had my camera pointed in the wrong direction. Sigh…

It was pretty cool to see these ‘fake’ fireworks. It kinda reminded me of Holi powder throwing. Since I missed the first barrage, I’m now getting nervous because there’s only one barrage left and I don’t know where it’s going off. Luckily, I brought a second camera setup and shot the above images handheld. Having seen and captured the second set of powderworks, I was happy. Watching the powder dissipate, I couldn’t help but to wonder which was worse, the colored ‘smoke’ or the fireworks smoke but came to the conclusion that there was much less powderworks so the amount of ‘smoke’ was considerably less and it didn’t last as long. Then I started to wonder which was worse to inhale, oh well, at least it looked nice.

Here’s the shot details:

Camera

Canon 5d2

Focal Length

40 mm

Aperture

f8

Shutter Speed

1/750

ISO

200

Thanks to @kalemandra for hosting the colorchallenge contests!

Consider following me for updates and to find not only my other travel bloopers, blunders and shenanigans but also photography related news/reviews and the occasional contest entry.

All the photos (unless otherwise noted in the post) were taken by me and are available for sale. If you’re interested in buying an image or three, 😃 please don’t hesitate to contact me for more details. Thanks in advance!

Comments & Critiques are always welcome, as are upvotes and resteems.

Thanks for viewing and best wishes,

Ray

PS. If you want to check out my other ‘works’, you can find them here:

Like this:

Hey everyone, just wanted y’all to know I’m on Steemit now. Here’s my profile: https://steemit.com/@rayshiuimages If you’re on Steemit, come check me out so I can follow ya back. If you’re not on Steemit, I encourage you to check it out, especially if you’re a content producer! Here’s the link to check ’em out: https://steemit.com

If you don’t know what Steemit is, it’s a social media platform like Facebook the difference being Facebook keeps all the revenue generated through YOUR data and has the power to censor/remove your content. Steemit shares at least some of it back to its users and your content is stored on a blockchain so it can’t be censored or deleted. It’s best if you check it out yourself as this subject could be touchy for some folks…

Then if you’ll notice the lighter font section near the bottom “Update 08/8/13:” I followed that. Voila! over exposures when off camera (3 different flashes) in ETTL mode. Manual is fine, on camera is fine.

So after months, more like a year of just using my flashes in Manual mode and finding it a paint to keep pushing the buttons on the Odin TCU, I decided to try and fix my odin’s. Also I went to a Godox sales pitch thing regarding their new line of strobist gear…The gear and tech put me in the mindset where I was at when I contemplated the change from Canon to Phottix. Cost vs Tech. Phottix won…It seems Godox (to me) is getting there in terms of quality. They are cheaper than Phottix in price and the seems more versatile. So I’m thinking about it because if I can get a fair price for my phottix gear, I can get a bigger (more stuff) Godox system. But then it’s such a hassle and I do so love my Phottix gear.

Anyways, as written on the Phottix page, it seems you need to turn the 1d to off…That didn’t work for me. However, I was thinking…ya maybe its a language barrier or I just interpreted it wrong, so I switched mine on. VOILA!!! IT WORKS!!! HAHAHA…don’t know why, or how but at this point, I don’t care cuz it’s working, YAY! If you’re pretty much in the same boat as I was, give it try, it’s just a setting, you can always change it back.

1d setting to fix ettl overexposure issues when using flash off camera

Good Luck! Hope this helps you!

UPDATE:

After the above fix, I was playing around some more and found out that my both my Mitros+ flashes when used on camera in Odin Tx mode would grossly over expose. What?!?! So first thing I did was check firmware, mine was outdated so I updated. That is the fix that worked for me. A firmware upgrade to v 2.12. You can get the downloads you need as well as instructions on the Phottix website.

NOTE: Apparently, the updater software is OS specific (yes even different versions of Windows). I’ve read about differing named Windows OS not working ie WinXP and WinVista but for me I couldn’t get the updater to update the second Mitros+ on my Win10 hybrid laptop (the type where you can remove the keyboard). I kept getting the “No FDS Device” error.

My fix was to use my regular laptop running Win10 to update the firmware. The process was smooth as butter for both my Mitro+ and Mitros.